Albums for all

[Music] Forms of music production, distribution, and consumption are rapidly changing. Why do and should albums still matter?

🎙️ Introduction

What’s going on? (in the words of Marvin Gaye)

Music, to me, is the gold of life.¹

A paradox: if you ask me what my favorite song or album is, I struggle to answer. Indeed, I feel that being preferential becomes harder the more personally-encoded interaction that anyone has with any set of things. A traveler struggles to choose a favorite country, just like a parent struggles to choose a favorite kid.

To that end, music discovery is certainly a hobby of mine, and I tend to associate music to other elements of life: timeframes, settings, and people. I’ve observed personal behavior where I gravitate towards a certain type of music at any given time, whether towards a song, or artist, or genre. But recently, I realized that there has been a gap – at least in recent years – in this specific-to-general musical range: albums.

How did I come to this? All of a sudden, artists within my general realm of awareness have started dropping albums left and right, so much so that I thought that something has to be going on. See for yourself; here’s just a handful within a few-months timeframe:

• Pour It Out Into The Night by The Revivalists (June 2)

• Who Is Afraid Of Blue? by Purr (June 2)

• Let There Be Music by Bonny Doon (June 16)

• Chris Black Changed My Life by Portugal. The Man (June 23)

• Melodies on Hiatus by Albert Hammond Jr. (June 23)

• Grapes Upon the Vine by TV Girl (June 30)

• In the End It Always Does by The Japanese House (June 30)

• Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift (July 7)

• Sunburn by Dominic Fike (July 7)

• The Ballad of Darren by Blur (July 21) 

• Austin by Post Malone (July 28)

• Utopia by Travis Scott (July 28)

• Bewitched by Laufey (September 8)

• Guts by Olivia Rodrigo (September 8)

• The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski (September 15)

• Just announced: Cousin by Wilco (September 29)

• Apparently, Rihanna… TBD this year?

A good portion of the artists behind these new albums are not really household names. Perhaps my music taste targets a niche subset of artists that act on similar inclines; perhaps summer is just a good season to release music; perhaps this is all coincidence. 

In any case, the sheer frequency of album drops, paired with their noticeably long titles and particular thematic framing, I felt that this is something to investigate. 

🎙️ Albums as…

… curation

Albums, by very implication of their form, are often crafted to tell narratives imbued with the perspective of the artist. This has been true since their development: the idea of an “album” accompanied the rise of the two-sided vinyl record. These records had actual physical limitations, whether it was a LP (“long play”), EP (“extended play”), or single. Today, these terms are still used to describe releases with certain durations – an album, generally synonymous with LP, contains around 40 or more minutes of music, with an EP having half that.

In the world of music, albums frequently represent the act of collection into a cohesive theme. Before the standard album format, vinyl records were used to compile “mixtapes” – a compilation of singles from different artists. When musicians embark on the journey of making an album, they commit to exploring different ideas, moods, and sounds, in a way that feels connected but not entirely disparate. 

The world’s best-selling albums include Thriller by Michael Jackson (1982), Back in Black by AC/DC (1980), and The Bodyguard, a soundtrack album, by Whitney Houston (1992). Reviews have tended to describe these, and other successful albums, as well-produced encapsulations of the artists at their “best.” Following the release of Thriller, for instance, The New York Times illustrated the album as “another signpost on the road to Michael Jackson's own artistic fulfillment,” calling out producer Quincy Jones and “his refined synthesis of the latest trends in soul, funk, rock and pop” as a part of Jackson’s success.

… attention

When I try to think of influential albums from my own lifespan, I can most clearly recall those that I listened to during my early teenage years, which include: AM by Arctic Monkeys (2013), In The Lonely Hour by Sam Smith (2014), and American Beauty/American Psycho by Fall Out Boy (2015). Around this time, I saved albums as a direct effect of my support of certain artists, seeing albums as accurate and enjoyable reflections of what they had to offer. Quite practically, because I did not not know who else to listen to, I would run through all the albums of the artists that I knew and narrow down my favorite songs from there. 

The affordance of choice has somewhat reversed this behavior. Now, I tend to first and foremost find individual songs of artists; the act of listening to full-length albums has become either an afterthought or an especially concerted effort, depending on my level of investment in their creators. Given that I have literally lived through the rise of Spotify, I can confirm that, like many others, my listening habits have been shaped by their playlists and generated blends.

So, the public’s degree of attention to albums has declined – is there a relationship between this trend and the overall quality of album releases? Recently, I felt that I could not personally identify what I have felt to be high-quality front-to-back albums released in the past decade. It turns out that this has been a wider phenomenon than, one that cultural commentators have identified as the “death of the album” in the 2010s. Owing to an increased focus on single hits, musicians have not been incentivized to create albums, whose sales have declined. (Within the past two decades alone, it has actually been soundtrack albums to top the charts: High School Musical (2006), High School Musical 2 (2007), Frozen (2014) and The Greatest Showman (2018) were all the best-selling albums of their respective years.)

In some ways, perhaps it is moot to lament the death of the album; it has not directly equated to a shortage of new, high-quality music itself. Plus, time often acts as a filter for quality music in a way that is hard to predict in the present. What might be more noteworthy is what has been implied by this trend: the fact that we as media consumers have not only shorter attention spans, but also generally lessened enthusiasm towards specific artists and to the involved act of music exploration and education.

… feelings

I struggle to write about music in general, but especially “new” music, mostly because I do not know how my feelings will shift with time.² When publications like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone write music reviews just hours after something is dropped, I wonder how forward-looking they are meant to be. The power of time is especially significant for multifaceted collections like albums; cultural significance and generational associations are not built in a mere few days.

I never thought much of albums like Parachutes by Coldplay (2000), Songs About Jane by Maroon 5 (2002), or Doo-Wops & Hooligans by Bruno Mars (2010) as a kid – but these are albums that I now find charming. Not exactly the highest of quality, but charming. Why? They provide a sense of comfort and nostalgia, even when their details feel fuzzy in my mind. Despite the astonishing number of times that I have listened to Parachutes (mostly as an accompaniment to sleeping on airplanes), I still cannot really conjure what the individual songs sound like if asked to do so. Still, the album encapsulates a certain feeling that I find myself returning to.

Albums are not repetitive in the same sense that songs are. I repeat songs to learn lyrics or a tune, but I repeat albums to learn its behavior. In this way, an album often acts as a sort of catch-all. It does not necessarily “get old,” for it is a home base for different pieces of music that are in some way related – by source, by inspiration, by train of thought. It reflects a certain level of granularity that I feel is intrinsic to holistic artistry. 

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🎙️ Appendix: The music industry

Commercial history & media!

In the music world, business models (that is to say, commercial releases) are heavily intertwined with the dominant distribution medium at any given time. 

1. Record players (aka phonographs, turntables) have been around since the late 1800s.³ But it wasn’t until, following many different iterations that they became affordable, peaking in the 1960s. Allowing people to play vinyl records (vinyls), their early days also influenced DJ/hip-hop culture. 

2. Like how vinyls could be played on record players, cassette tapes, introduced in the early 1960s, could be played on cassette players, like the Sony Walkman (1979). Such portable audio players gained popularity, with cassettes eventually overshadowing vinyls in the mid-1980s. 

We can easily observe the transition from analogue to digital media… 

3. The compact disc (CD), the first pre-recorded digital audio format, grew quickly since their introduction in the early 1980s, with sales overtaking vinyls and then cassette tapes by the end of the decade.  like CD players, an early form of portable media players (PMPs), necessarily gained traction, as well.

4. Then… the MP3 file format was invented in the 1990s. Internet platforms like Napster (1999), a P2P music file sharing service, took advantage of MP3 to share music over the Internet. The Apple iPod, a PMP for MP3s, rode the digital music wave through a revolutionary consumer product.⁴

5. From iTunes (2003) to Pandora (2005) to Spotify (2008), digital platforms grew quickly in the 2000s. Cloud-based streaming services have since continued to allow users to download and stream music at their own convenience, as the foundation for the modern music industry. This is where we are today: an era of streaming, with many artists fighting for consumer attention, and an increasing number of algorithms for personalized recommendations

There’s a whole lot about audio engineering for different analog/digital music formats that is another rabbit hole worth investigating. 

People!

With many parallels to other artistic industries like film, the music industry is defined by several roles:

1. The musicians. The singers, instrumentalists, and all that. They often strive for record deals, sponsorships, and other industry opportunities. 

2. The talent management. The representatives (whether by individuals or companies) that support the day-to-day operations of musicians. Their goal is artist development and growth, through management of finances, strategy, events, etc. They help musicians make decisions on who to partner with and how to negotiate contracts.

3. The record labels. The fuel behind the magic; these are entities who invest money into musicians, and expect ROI. Record labels provide the actual resources to create and engineer music with studio time, as well as expert techniques to market to target audiences through sales and publicity. They have traditionally been responsible for licensing (i.e., copyright management) and distribution, which may involve hiring other stakeholders, like distributors. 

4. The distributors. These guys used to manage supply chains; now, they manage digital infrastructure and rights. They help musicians actually make their music available, whether through retailers, streaming services (e.g., Spotify), or digital stores (e.g., Amazon). 

The economics of the music business is certainly complex and nebulous – involving different types of copyright, royalties, and record deals. What should generally be known is that managers and record labels take cuts of musicians’ revenues, often in the ranges of 15-20% and 50-90%, respectively.

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🎙️ Conclusion

Digital streaming services, distribution tools, and social media are affecting how people are approaching and discovering music. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, traditional roles of the music business are becoming more obsolete due to blurred distinctions. Between talent management and record labels, the prior has been increasingly behaving like the latter, like ‘de facto’ labels. Streaming services are becoming distributors (and in some cases, record labels). Now, musicians can successfully create and self-release music without formal partnerships, being conscious of retaining the ownership of their master copyrights.⁵

At the end of the day, these changing economics may not favor the “album” as “products” that will catch on quickly with audiences, who now have wide-ranging access to all sorts of music.

Yet, I am hopeful for the future of albums, out of two reasons: 1) my own selfish appreciation of them, and 2) pure observation of more musicians creating albums that in some way feel pronouncedly thematic. I am optimistic that artistry will prevail, especially given the unique affordances of the album format.

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🎙️ Resources

• On music distribution: Soundcharts Blog

• On music royalties: Indie Music Academy Blog, SonoSuite Blog

• On album formats: Landr Blog, Splice Blog

• On record players: Victrola Blog, cassette tapes: Billboard, Walkman & iPod: The Atlantic, CDs: The Guardian, MP3: NPR, Napster: The Guardian

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🎙️ Author’s notes

Disclaimer: Recall that much Kneeslapper writing will be just a little toe-dip into subjects that interest me. Description of “trends” will bias towards being empirical. Take everything with a grain of salt!

Reflection: This took more than a month to get together. It was difficult – I got stuck in the weeds, trying to learn the ins-and-outs of the music industry so that I could feel like I had enough perspective to be able to write about it. I ended up reading strongly opinionated music reviews on r/Music, discovering to-read books like How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt, and got confused at all the jargon (what are all those different “royalties”?). All is to say, trying to write within a field that you are not an expert in is intimidating! I have gotten a feel for the research scope that makes sense for Kneeslapper, and I aim to keep fine-tuning this in a way that is manageable. :)

Done: Had my first big Korean BBQ experience.

Doing: Finishing my summer internship.

To do: Run a 10K.

Find your new favorite song!

1. Spotify tells me that I have created >400 playlists and saved nearly 7K songs.

2. At the time of writing, I can say that Being Funny in a Foreign Language by The 1975 (2022) has been gaining personal significance for me over the past year, though some more time is probably needed to pinpoint the why and the how.

3. Something you may or may not remember with elementary school: the phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison. 

4. Though I never had one, RIP. (The iPod was discontinued in 2022.)

5. If you don’t understand this in the context of why Taylor Swift is re-recording all of her albums, then that is probably a good place to start.